Posted by denised in The really bad rap label CEO and his self fulfilling prophecy
I’m no medium, but I could have seen this one coming a mile away. I think we all can predict a life of crime, imprisonment and possibly death for anyone, if they do the following:
- Start a rap label and call it anything having to with drugs, crime, arrests, murder…you get the idea. In this case let’s call it Take Down Records.
- Make yourself CEO and give yourself an alias that carries the promise of organized crime. In this scenario let’s use the always popular surname Capone. Ace Capone.
- Star in one of your own label’s music videos as…Ace Capone, the violent drug kingpin - Be really convincing, because the video will be used as evidence against you in your own trial
- When the cops raid your home, have on hand; over $500K in cash, 10 guns and 450 grams of cocaine.
- Finally, do all of this in Philadelphia, the city with the ‘drug kingpin’ statute.
Ace. Capone no more - Image:Philly.com
35 year old Alton Coles, aka Ace Capone, was sentenced to mandatory life plus 55 years on Thursday for, among other things drug trafficking, wire fraud, money laundering and weapons offenses. Alton, the CEO of Take Down Records, father of five and owner of a local day care and ice water stand, cried while telling the judge that life in prison was too harsh a sentence for selling drugs.
I’m not here to argue about whether the sentence was fair or not. Or, whether Coles’ harsh childhood, including a crackhead father and absentee mother should have been taken into account during sentencing. That’s for another blog and another day. What I am saying is this. If, as a CEO, you choose, among all the words available to you in the English language, to name your company using a combination of words associated with crime, you choose to name yourself after a notorious gangster and you choose to write about, rap about and star in videos about selling drugs, then when you get busted, that is what we call a self fulfilling prophesy. Read more about the case against Coles here.
